As the new interactive advertising ecosystem takes shape, some industry advertisers have expressed skepticism that the owners of ad exchanges can operate as neutral brokers given their ownership of most of the media offered for sale on the platforms. Indeed, Gartner raised a fundamental question in its July 2010 report on "Media Industry Advertising" -- "How long will the ad exchange marketplace overlook conflicts of interest in the current structure and continue to allow the largest sellers of display advertising to operate ad exchanges based on little more than assurances of neutrality?"

An ad buyer can ensure against any seller bias by connecting to multiple ad exchanges and dynamically allocating its buys across platforms and publishers. If an exchange or a seller fails to provide competitive pricing or inventory transparency, the buyer can divert its spend away to a more buyer friendly exchange or publisher offering superior value. After all, it's in a media seller's rational business interest to maximize its own revenue and profit. This can manifest as hidden price floors, data cloaking, selective inventory allocations, and even "simple" buyer workflow tools that implicitly bias spend in the direct of the media seller.

This is why the market has embraced technology created by an independent company, like DataXu's DX2, to maximize the buyer's return on ad spend. The DX2 system dynamically allocates an advertiser's buy across multiple ad exchanges and publisher inventory sources, automatically placing buys where the advertiser gets the most "bang for its buck." The system analyzes over 30,000 ad placement opportunities per second, and makes adjustments every 0.3 milliseconds. Consequently, when one exchange becomes less cost effective, for whatever reason, the system automatically redistributes the advertiser's budget among other more competitive sellers.

To confirm these dynamics and illustrate how they play out in practice, the DataXu Advanced Analytics Group reviewed the spend data for four different successful Financial Services campaigns, where in each campaign the advertiser hit or exceeded their cost per action goal. The analysis demonstrates that the exchange media mix for each campaign is very different -- no two are alike. Based on real-time neutral science -- ads are placed only where they are proven to drive the best results. See attached chart.